The invention relates generally to the field of system and network testing, and more specifically to a means of testing systems that employ Real-Time Innovations Data Distribution Service (RTI DDS).
The Data Distribution Service (DDS) paradigm is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard addressing publish-subscribe communications for real-time and embedded systems. Using DDS, applications of distributed systems share information by reading and writing data-objects. The Real-Time Innovations Data Distribution Service (RTI DDS) suite is one implementation of a data distribution service.
Currently, when testing a software application A that communicates using DDS, an operator must first write a custom DDS-enabled program B to send messages that A receives in kind. Conversely, B must also receive messages that A sends in order to fully test A. This is a tedious process for simple testing purposes.
Consequently, there exists a desire to provide a user-friendly graphical interface for viewing, modifying and sending/receiving DDS messages in any given domain. The scope and content of messages in one problem domain will differ greatly from another. The desirable aspect of this user-friendly interface would be the ability to view, modify, and send/receive messages in any given problem domain, without having to write a specific program (i.e., the aforementioned software application B) to do so.
The reflection capability of the Java programming language has been used for a variety of purposes in computer science. Its power lies in the ability to manipulate data in computer memory, the exact format of which is unknown until runtime (the time at which an application is run). As such, it is aptly suitable to providing the graphical interface described above. So far as is known, using Java reflection (or any other similar capability) to accomplish this particular task of sending and receiving messages in any given problem domain has not been done before.